There are several known techniques for storing a large number of documents in a database. A single document in the database may contain references to other documents and for instance to image (graphics) files and/or sound files of the same or even to a separate database.
An example of the kind of document stored in such a database is an HTML document (HyperText Markup Language) ie. the “hyperdocument”, which is widely used in an Internet environment. The “Internet” is a worldwide network of computers capable of communication with each other by means of a suitable protocol, such as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). During recent years the use of the Internet has expanded rapidly, especially after the introduction of so called Web browsers which allow a simple graphical user interface based (GUI) access to network servers supporting HTML documents.
Typically, a database of HTML documents is stored on a Web server connected to the WWW (World Wide Web). The WWW can be understood in turn as a collection of servers connected to the Internet, which utilise so-called HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). This HTTP in turn utilises said HTML standard page description.
It is possible to browse separate documents in given locations by a suitable terminal device, ie. a “Web browser”, which can consist of a microcomputer or a workstation. When the Web browser is connected to the WWW, a Web server receives an URL (Uniform Resource Locator) request from the browser, decodes the URL, handles the document files and sends the requested files to the Web browser.
It is also possible to browse documents locally, ie. in a local file system of a data processing device which may not be connected to the WWW—i.e. a so called stand-alone data processing device. In this case, the document address (ie. a local file path) is given to the local file system which then retrieves the file for the browser. By using relative document references it is possible to transfer the whole document collection to a different location without any modifications to the documents itself.